Musically – Listening With Whales

Listening Musically with Whales

Written by Marie Comuzzo, Finn Woodson-Gammon, David Rothenberg, and Alex South

How do we make meaning of a sound? And what happens when that sound comes from a whale? The way we listen shapes the kinds of relationships we are able to have. Human-whale connections highlight how listening can transform the way we relate to another being. During the 120 years of industrialized commercial whaling, starting approximately in the 1860s, whale sounds were referred to as utterances or lamentations and whales were epistemologically silent. In other words, they didn’t pose any moral conditions to those killing them and deriving profit from their bodies. Indeed, Western people valued whales exclusively for their blubber and the various products that could be derived from their bodies (see also listening historically page). However, in many parts of the world, whales had been long seen as sacred, in part, also because of their singing, and their gifts of songs and rhythms to humans (learn more about ancestral connections). Since the 1970s, musicians, scientists, and many other listeners have begun to attune more closely to whales, listening for depth, intelligence, and personhood. In this page we explore some of the ways in which musicians have helped shaping the ways we relate, think of, and imagine ourselves through whales, and how that has radically changed our moral obligations towards them.

What follows is a musicological account of human whale connections, tracing the history of their musical encounters. Here is a quick TOC (table of contents), jump to:
1. An interactive timeline of human-whale connections, legislations, and music;
2. How whales make it into concert halls;
3. Contemporary encounters between humans and whales;
4. Embodied encounters and some science on how sound travels underwater;
5. What is that sound? And what does it mean?! Some theoretical reflections.

Some of the key figures you can find: Judy Collins, George Crumb, Emily Doolittle, Alan Hovhaness, Annie Lewandowski, David Rothenberg, Abigail Sanders, Alex South, Katy and Roger Payne, Paul Winter.

A Wast Array of Whale Inspired Music: A Brief History

First recorded in the late 1940s by accident from a U.S. Navy installation listening for soviet submarine activity, humpback whales’ communication has now been studied for over seventy years. These first recordings were initially classified as top secret, and very few people could access them. However, once the war subsided, in the 1960s, when many species of whales were at the brink of extinctions, scientists and musicians applied their listening skills to humpback singing, partially to try to save them. Scott and Hella McVay, alongside Katie and Roger Payne, two young bioacousticians and classically trained musicians, printed out spectrograms of humpback vocalizations recorded through hydrophones, seven seconds at a time, they collaged them together into huge sheets and then proceeded to analyze them as one would do with a score (South 2022; Bridge 2025)

Their studies revealed complex evolving songs, defined by units, phrases, and long repeating themes.

In 1970, Roger and Katy Payne also released Songs of the Humpback Whale, a 5 track, 34 minutes long LP containing a representative sample of what they theorized as songs. The aim for the listening experience was to be as loyal as possible as to the whale’s experience, and the liner notes included specific directions to listen in a quiet space, without interruptions, imagining being a lone whale in the ocean. At the time this was released, at least 33.000 baleen whales were killed each year.

Framing them as songs, rather than as lamentation or utterances, both within scientific communities and in popular culture, was a very important step in making whales more relatable to humans and fostering a sense of care and responsibility for their lives. In this sense, the recognition of whale song changed the moral conditions under which whales were perceived and valued.

The album sold 45,000 copies in 1970, and in the years to follow it would sell more than 125,000. Millions of people started protesting across the globe joining the Save The Whales movement, resulting in a global uprising to stop commercial whaling and contrast the dramatic decline of whale populations. By 1979, it was distributed by National Geographic in a flexi-disk to 10.5 million subscribers. (The flexi-disk version is different from the original album in that it draws parallels to bird songs by speeding up fourteen times the humpback songs, and it also contains documentary-style narrations, whereas the original album featured exclusively humpback whale songs (Bridge 2025, p. 234).

Today, Songs of the Humpback Whale continues to be the best-selling nature recording of all time, with over 30 million copies sold (Todd 2014, p. 53).

An interactive timeline of the many ways human listened to and with whales, and how that changed environmental policies, laws, and culture.

This ever growing interactive timeline traces the many ways humans have listened to and with whales and how those acts of listening reshape environmental law, scientific knowledge, music, and more broadly cultural imagination. Move through the timeline to explore pivotal recordings, performances, and political movements. Scroll and click any entry to listen, watch, and explore further.

“In 1964, the Beatles were the sensation of the musical world. In 1965, it was the Stones and Dylan. And this year, the Humpbacks are setting the musical world agog.”

– John Hanrahan, “The Humpbacks,”The Washington Post, June 11, 1970.

whales make it into concert halls and tour the world

Among the many things that the Paynes did, was to send recordings of humpbacks to notable musicians and composers, for example American avant-garde composer George Crumb, who immediately composed Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), a piece for electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano, which was premiered in 1971 by the New York Camerata (Salgrado 2023, Cook 2022).

In June 1970, Alan Hovhaness’ symphonic poem And God Created Great Whales, one of his late works that would become among his most famous, was premiered by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Andre Kostelanetz.

Kostelanetz commissioned the piece specifically to spread the cause of “Save the Whales” and share a cry to action, thereby calling the public to invest in whale preservation. Significantly, within the concert program notes, there was an advertising sheet for Songs of the Humpback Whale. Hovhaness was also a beloved composer in Japan, where he had spent significant time in the 1960s conducting the Tokyo Symphony and Japan Philharmonic – both of which performed his pieces – and where he often returned in the 1970s.

The same year of the release of Songs of the Humpback Whales and And God Created Great Whales, Judy Collins, now Grammy award winning recording artists and social activist released Whales & Nightingales. In a 2014 interview with Roger Payne and Michael May, Collins told the story of how she was first introduced to humpbacks. Apparently, Roger simply showed up backstage at one of her concerts and gave her a reel-to-reel tape. She describes listening to humpbacks for the first time: “I was very emotional. Angst for being a human being on a planet where they also live – guilt for doing what we do to them.”

In “Farewell to Tarwathie,” the seventh track of the album, Collins juxtaposes this well-known whaling song with the live-recorded humpback songs, whose singers seem to cry for help every time whaling is mentioned. Doing so, she creates a jarring and moving atmosphere that gives agency to whales and positions them sonically in such a way that they seem to ask humans for help. In her own words: “You hear the whales come in and then I join them, and it is like a call and response in a way because I am having a dialogue with them and vice versa because they’re answering me as well. And in a sense, reaching out into the human species” (May 2014). The following year the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) named Collins’ album a Gold Record, meaning it had sold over 500,000 copies in the US.

In later years, Paul Winter – a New England-based jazz musician who coined the genre Earth music and throughout his life released over 53 albums – was nominated for thirteen Grammys and won seven of them. (For more on the life of Paul Winter, Gluck 2019) Winter is an important advocate for whale rights and was deeply influenced by the Paynes’ discovery of humpback songs. He started working closely with whale songs after attending one of Roger’s lectures in 1968 at Rockefeller University in New York City. After that, everything changed for him. In his own words,

“Hearing [Songs of the Humpback Whale] was a milestone experience in my musical life. I was thrilled by the haunting beauty of these humpback whale voices, much as I had been when I first heard jazz saxophonists like Charlie Parker. Studying the long, complex songs which the whales repeat again and again, I was amazed by their musical intelligence, and shocked to learn that these magnificent beings were rapidly being hunted to extinction. The whales opened my ears to the whole symphony of nature, and expanded my world forever.”

– Paul Winter

Winter uses humpback songs in several of his albums, most notably in Callings (1980) – for which he composed a lullaby, where he melodicizes humpback songs and then freely improvises on them– and Whales Alive! (1987). Before recording these albums, he participated in, and even organized, several fundraising events and conferences aimed at saving the whales.

These are just few of the many examples that stemmed from this discovery and album release (explore more in the above timeline and with the interactive globe). In the last 50 years, there has been a huge boom of cultural production centering whales. From being valued only for the products derived from their bodies, whales become valued as cultural agents, with lots of human culture being informed by them, as evidenced in a growing body of literature, music, performances, and movies dedicated to them. In concomitance with this growing body of culture, laws changed, making whaling illegal in most of the world, and culminating last year in Polynesia with the declaration of whales as legal persons.

Contemporary Sonic Encounters Between Humans and Whales

Today, whales’ songs continue to inspire musicians. In 2021 National Geographic released a special issue with a humpback whale song translated into staff notation by professor and musician David Rothenberg. For a musician, this translation offers a more legible understanding of a song, as supposed to spectrogram, which is more commonly used to study whale vocalizations.

For more transcriptions of whale songs, also check out Alexander Lieberman‘s work and his recent humpback transcription.

Rothenberg recurrently goes out into the ocean to find in his own words, “musicians who happen to not be humans” and records music with them. He was the first person to record live with humpbacks, through a system of technology as depicted by the visualization below. As we improvise, compose, sing, and play with them, we learn to relate, attune, and listen with, we move beyond ourselves and learn from these giant beings. The permeability of these encounters reveals the profound ways in which sonic exchanges shape our ability to relate to each other.

This graphic shows how to improvise live with whales, breaching the boundary between water and air through technology. David plays into a microphone that projects and amplifies his sound underwater through a speaker. At the same time, he uses a hydrophone to pick up the sounds underwater, which he listens to through headphones. Doing so, he is able to improvise live with whales. Find more about it in Whale Music (2023, p. 253).

Live Improvisation in Maui: David Rothenberg and a Humpback Whale duetting

Multi-species composer Emily Doolittle composes alongside more-than-humans in countless different ways. She studies their sonic structures and gestures and in turn those inspire her own composition and musical language. When it comes to whales, she wrote “Social Sounds from Whales at Night” (2007), written for solo voice, and transcribed for oboe d’amore and tape; as well as “Bowhead,” a trio inspired by the vast array of sounds that bowheads communicate with.

The score for “Social Sounds from Whales at Night,” is available here for download.

In the last five years, horn player Abigail Sanders has dedicated her studies to the development of a new notation system that is able to more loyally reflect the complexity of humpback sounds. Here are various sample score she wrote that hold both the spectrogram tracing of sound as well as the translation of the sounds in staff notation. Sometimes, she also has annotated words to indicate specific echoes that she uses as additional mnemonic tools to most accurately reproduce their sounds through the horn. As can be observed from her performance of a humpback whale song on her horn, the listening of humpback whales also inspires the development of new techniques that can accurately replicate their sounds.

Some of the most meaningful discoveries in the more-than-human world have come from devoted listeners. Katy Payne used her Western classical formalist training (she studied with Donald Grout at Cornell University) to listen closely to humpbacks and discovered the long evolving structures that their song became so famous for. Half a century later, composer Annie Lewandowski is listening closely to humpback individual’s variations in songs to try to learn more about the co-compositional process and more (read more about some of her work here and check out her & Kyle McDonald‘s project SIREN: COMPOSERS OF THE SEA, and their shared presentation where they explain the whole project). These two approaches embody a macro/micro dialectic of opposites: the systemic drive to understand an entire species, together with the intimate experience of listening to one whale closely to know their individual expression. It also reflects how musicians and scientists are approaching the study of whale sonic exchanges.

Studying whale communication has historically required translation and compression: signals made into notes in the equal temperament, sounds visualized through printed and digital spectrograms, sperm whale clicks studied as language, and so on. By listening with whales at this edge, we are required to confront the limits of Western hierarchies of music and language.

Machine Learning offers different ways of making meaning that potentially complicate and queer those distinctions, without however moving past hierarchies of worth, which are always culturally constructed and produced (for a bit more on ML and AI and how they are used in scientific studies click here).

For example, long structure, multiple themes, evolving over time, and complex listening practices are societally constructed as superior to more simple songs that can be easily heard, replicated, and learned. Far from being neutral, these constructed hierarchies of sound have been central to the framing of the European man as superior to all others, and his musical output, especially symphonic repertoire, as the epitome of human evolution and culture. Thus, what the history of whales and how whale songs are valued provides a lens to examine relations of extraction, hierarchy, and supposed evolutionary superiority, and how those are framed through the act of listening.

Embodied Encounters & How Sound Travels Underwater

However, listening with whales is also to become attuned to them and their sonic expression alongside our own physiological responses. Attunement is to enter in a space of unknowing and being changed by the experience of reaching toward a different lifeform that we can, somehow, have a deeply embodied exchange with. While sound in air is mostly processed through our ears, sound in water is touch: a physical experience of whole-bodied, bone-deep resonance. Listening and attuning thus merge underwater, and knowing becomes a mindful practice as much as an embodied one.

Under water, it is not vision but vibration that organizes experience. Light dissolves quickly in the ocean’s depth, but sound travels with astonishing speed and fidelity, moving nearly five times faster in seawater than in air and across distances that can span entire ocean basins. Cetaceans rely on sound not simply to communicate but also to orient themselves in space, to navigate migration routes, to coordinate encounters, and to sustain social worlds that unfold largely beyond the reach of human perception.

A single humpback’s song typically lasts between five and thirty minutes, averaging around fifteen, and is repeated over and over in sessions that can stretch for hours. One whale recorded in the Caribbean sang for twenty-two hours straight, surfacing only to breathe between phrases, still singing when the exhausted researcher went home. These songs evolve over time, shifting gradually, never sung in precisely the same way. Strikingly, changes spread across entire populations within a matter of months, as though a new musical trend has swept through a distant oceanic city. While the dominant narrative states that these are songs used to attract mates and advertise male reproductive fitness, we still really do not know why they sing.

Learn more from Alex South about humpback whales songs, their structures, the challenges of recording whales, and much more. South is also a musician and composer who works alongside whales. See below some of his recent compositions and check out his interdisciplinary dissertation “Cetacean Citations: Rhythmic Variability in the Composition and Recomposition of Humpback Whale Song,” and his interdisciplinary project “Keening—Song of the Standings” a ritual to honor and grieve the lives of stranded pilot whales in Scotland (read more about it here).

Hey! What is that sound?! And what does it MEAN?

Some Theoretical Reflections

To listen musically with whales is to resist the urge to reduce their songs to reproductive function. It is to move away from what we might call reproductive listening or the assumption that any elaborate sound must be instrumental, goal-directed, biologically efficient. Musical listening, by contrast lingers with pattern, variation, timbre, and duration. It asks not “what is this for?” but “how does this unfold?”

Humpback songs are organized into repeating structures that feel almost Wagnerian in their scope as cyclical and seemingly unending, and they are often referred to as the “symphonies of whales,” or more metaphorically, “the symphonies of the sea.” Yet unlike Western symphonic tension and release, they often lack clear teleology. There is a circularity, a non-directionality, a sense that the song could last forever. When we attempt to transcribe them into Western notation, we immediately encounter friction: humpbacks slide between pitches and shape phrases according to a respiratory logic utterly unlike our own (check out this video to learn more about human albeit male-centered symphonies, and check out this playlist to learn more about the great variety of symphonic repertoire written by women.)

Musical listening shifts the frame. Rather than parsing each whistle for semantic content we might hear texture, rhythm, interplay. We might ask what happens when multiple whales vocalize together, such as during the peak singing season in the waters off the Hawaiian islands each spring. We tend to isolate a single “solo” whale because it is easier for us to analyze. But what if we dared to hear them as choirs? Or as David likes to say communal “improvisation sessions”?

Whales Singing/Improvising Together in Maui. Recording from David Rothenberg.

Alternative frameworks might begin elsewhere. Instead of defining music by organization, intention, or aesthetic autonomy, we might define it relationally: as patterned vibration that gathers bodies together; as sound embedded in social exchange; as a mode of attunement. Ethnomusicologists have long argued that in many cultures there is no single word that corresponds to the Western category “music” at all. There are words for song, for dance, for prayer, and for storytelling, but not for an abstract art form detachable from them.

This matters when we turn back to whales.

If we approach humpback song armed only with Eurocentric definitions that center organized sound, intentional composition, and aesthetic autonomy or “the music itself,” we risk asking the wrong questions. Is it structured like a symphony? Does it have themes? Is it meant to communicate semantic content? Is it a mating display? These are not neutral inquiries because they arise from a history that has separated art from function, composer from listener, and culture from nature.

But if we draw instead on relational or experiential definitions, music as what we experience as musical; music as vibrational sociality; music as patterned time shared among bodies – then whale song appears differently. We are less concerned with whether whales “intend” to make music and more attuned to how their sounds circulate, how they evolve across populations, how they generate shared temporal fields underwater. The question shifts from “Is this music?” to “What happens when we listen this way?”

Musical listening, in this broader sense, claims nothing about ontology but is rather a practice of attention that allows space for the coexistence of multiple epistemologies about what sound is and does. It makes room for the possibility that whales inhabit sonic worlds that are already cultural, already relational, already aesthetic, without requiring them to resemble human music.

In that light, defining music becomes less an act of classification and more an ethical gesture. Rather than securing the borders of a European concept, we let the ocean trouble them. We allow humpback temporality in its vast, slow arcs and cyclical returns to stretch our sense of musical time. We allow underwater acoustics where sound travels faster, farther, and through the body to unsettle terrestrial assumptions about how music is felt.

The point, then, is not to declare that whale song fits our definition of music. It is to recognize that our definitions are partial, situated, and historically contingent, and that listening musically to whales may require loosening them. In doing so, we do not merely expand the category of music but we expand our capacity to hear.

Humpback Whale Recording, Mo’orea, Tahiti, October 2023